Top 100 Eric Schlosser Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws.”

— Eric Schlosser

52. “No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.”

— Eric Schlosser

53. “The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.”

— Eric Schlosser

54. “American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For.”

— Eric Schlosser

55. “A poor grasp of dead reckoning may have led Christopher Columbus to North America instead of India, a navigational error of about eight thousand miles.”

— Eric Schlosser

56. “The people designing the weapons literally often didn’t know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force – and a lot of people in the Air Force didn’t understand some of the dangers. There’s a very strong element of madness in this.”

— Eric Schlosser

57. “As an investigative reporter, I’m trying to uncover things and expose them to create a dialogue.”

— Eric Schlosser

58. “Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites.”

— Eric Schlosser

59. “I think there could hardly be a more important subject than health and nutrition.”

— Eric Schlosser

60. “I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn’t know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public.”

— Eric Schlosser

61. “Andropov’s concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration’s top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The.”

— Eric Schlosser

62. “Whenever power is concentrated and unaccountable – whether it’s corporate power, governmental power, or religious power – it inevitably leads to abuses. Human beings are imperfect, and you need a system of check and balances to keep them in line, to encourage good behavior. You need competing centers of power.”

— Eric Schlosser

63. “The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn’t fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.”

— Eric Schlosser

64. “There’s a real strong link today between soda consumption and obesity among children.”

— Eric Schlosser

65. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

— Eric Schlosser

66. “Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them – if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or.”

— Eric Schlosser

67. “By 1940, there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more cars than in forty-one states.”

— Eric Schlosser

68. “Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what’s going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.”

— Eric Schlosser

69. “Captain Barry steered the plane back toward land and ordered the crew to bail out. One of the copilots, Captain Theodore Schreier, mistakenly put on a life jacket over his parachute. He was never seen again. The.”

— Eric Schlosser

70. “I think it’s possible to have food that’s healthy, that’s good for you to eat, that’s also inexpensive. We don’t have to have this cheap, unhealthy food being so aggressively promoted.”

— Eric Schlosser

71. “But one of Arnold’s commanders was too cocky and nonchalant. He once removed a dummy weapon from a storage bunker in broad daylight, put it into the back of his pickup truck, covered it with a tarp, drove right past security, and disassembled it in front of his girlfriend. Arnold thought the move was stupid and irresponsible, as well as a major breach of security. Inside the bunker, the dummy weapons were stored beside the real ones.”

— Eric Schlosser

72. “General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about “a great big beautiful tomorrow.”

— Eric Schlosser

73. “And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

— Eric Schlosser

74. “Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea.”

— Eric Schlosser

75. “What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.”

— Eric Schlosser

76. “The Snark eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil.”

— Eric Schlosser

77. “We can have Americans eating affordably and eating in a way that’s sustainable.”

— Eric Schlosser

78. “The fear of murder has grown so enormous in the United States that it leaves a taint, like the mark of Cain, on everyone murder touches.”

— Eric Schlosser

79. “I think for real change to happen, it’s going to have to come from the kids, the community, the teachers, the parents.”

— Eric Schlosser

80. “Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints.”

— Eric Schlosser

81. “Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person – that’s nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person.”

— Eric Schlosser

82. “By birth and upbringing, I think I’m emotionally resilient. I don’t feel like I’m a depressive person.”

— Eric Schlosser

83. “Moser was a great believer in checklists.”

— Eric Schlosser

84. “Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.”

— Eric Schlosser

85. “McMahon predicted that “total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction.” The.”

— Eric Schlosser

86. “I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn’t anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.”

— Eric Schlosser

87. “What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand.”

— Eric Schlosser

88. “The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.”

— Eric Schlosser

89. “The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal – but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.”

— Eric Schlosser

90. “The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.”

— Eric Schlosser

91. “A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30 percent were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and 53.3 percent were contaminated with Clostridium perfringens.”

— Eric Schlosser

92. “It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The.”

— Eric Schlosser

93. “Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation.”

— Eric Schlosser

94. “Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn’t provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every.”

— Eric Schlosser

95. “Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The.”

— Eric Schlosser

96. “A brand offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always and everywhere the same.”

— Eric Schlosser

97. “We found very little correlation between turnover and profitability...”

— Eric Schlosser

98. “During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy.”

— Eric Schlosser

99. “One historian has described the federal government’s 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in “interstate socialism” –.”

— Eric Schlosser

100. “About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.”

— Eric Schlosser